I'm not a professional chef....I just like to play one in the kitchen

It’s always so fun to get my monthly box of Organic Girl Greens for recipe creation, but this month was even better! They sent me two brand new mixes to try, Super Spinach and Mache Rosettes. Both are ahhhhhmazing, but lets start off with the Spinach.

I enjoy the challenge of not ALWAYS making a salad with the greens and occasionally coming up with something unique and “outside of the box”, so my first thought was Pesto.

As you can see from above, the ingredients for a pesto are quite simple.

First off dry toast the Pine Nuts. Use whatever method you are comfortable with, I just do them for a few minutes over med-high heat on the stove but be cautious, once they start to burn, the flavor is to overpowering and not good.

Most people use a food processor to make Pesto. I don’t have one so I use my Nutri-Bullet, which is far more powerful than an ordinary blender. I just layered and packed all the ingredients in and added the EVOO last.

Voila! Spinach Pesto! But my idea isn’t finished. I decided to use the Pesto to make Crepes and fill them with some sweet and savory ingredients.

In order to make crepes you need Flour. I realized I have never made Gluten Free Crepes before, so this was going to be a real experiment. I decided to reach for my Cup 4 Cup All Purpose Gluten Free Flour. I have had great success with it a few times in the past, so it was time to put it to the crepe test!

I decided to use the Pesto to replace some of the eggs, regular crepes use more than 1 egg. Mix all ingredients together in a blender (my handy Nutri-Bullet). My Grandmother always taught me to refrigerate the batter for an hour or so before making crepes, a step I actually JUST remembered! Yikes. Man she made the most amazing light and fluffy crepes you can imagine – so I missed this step but you don’t have to.

Now if you have a crepe pan, that is ideal. I of course have 2 (my own and my late gram’s) If not use a shallow skillet. Place on Medium heat and wipe down with some EVOO. You just want to coat the pan in a sheen of it. Now I haven’t made crepes in a LONG time, not once since going Gluten Free in 2008, so I was a bit nervous. They are just as easy to screw up as they are to make. As you can see from my first attempt:

Whoops!

That’s ok, unless you regularly make them expect to screw up the first ….well few to be honest! Ha! Afterwards I got the hang of it again.

My batter was a bit thick….I probably could have used a smidge more milk. (Yes I said smidge…I feel like I channel gram sometimes in the kitchen)

So I poured about 1/4 cup batter in the center and immediately used a silicone spatula to spread it around to cover most of the pan. Let it cook until you see the little bubbles you do in pancakes and the edges are starting to lightly brown then carefully flip over. This also takes practice, when they are thin and perfectly cooked, they flip over like a dream. IF not…well just keep practicing.

Place crepes on wax paper in layers while cooking the rest until you are finished. Now it is time to fill. This is where you can get creative, but I will tell you the fillings I chose for these. For the Sweet I grabbed these Fruit Pastes at the supermarket by Rutherford & Meyer.

These tasted GREAT, but they were more of a jell-like consistency,good for a cheese plate, so they didn’t spread very easily. You could choose to use your favorite kind of fresh fruit preserves. However, when I heated up leftovers the next day, the fruit paste turned into an amazing fruit glaze. So the consistency is great for that!

Now I have to say, I was VERY impressed with the crepes in the fact that the Cup 4 Cup GF Flour did an outstanding job. I brought them down to Mom and she whole heartedly agreed! Now, they were not QUITE as light and fluffy as Gram’s, but considering I substituted Pesto for eggs and used GF Flour, they were pretty damn close!

Or brunch……or breakfast for dinner, you get the idea. Generally when you think of Kale, you may not think of it as a breakfast element unless you are juicing it or using it in a smoothie. That’s how I used to think of Kale in the morning, then I put it in scrambled eggs and realized it’s far more versatile and goes REALLY well with eggs.

Organic Girl 100% Baby Kaleis very sweet and tender as I have mentioned before, munching on it straight out of the package is delicious, so I decided to experiment with it for breakfast dishes beyond scrambled eggs and the results were very yummy. I actually served both as “breakfast for dinner” a big favorite of mine but I think both or versatile enough to be served at any time of day you like, it all depends on how much you like breakfast.

I don’t know about you, but I LOVE breakfast. I mean I love food in general…obviously, but breakfast is my favorite meal. Strangely enough breakfast holds many many memories for me, more so then any other meal…particularly “downthashore”. That’s how you say “Going to the beach” if you are from Philadelphia or New Jersey.

Growing up, we had a beach house in Ocean City and most mornings Dad was in charge of breakfast. This was decades before I realized I should be eating Gluten Free so we had pancakes, pork roll sandwiches (another Jersey/Philly thing), sticky buns from Mallon’s…you name it. I even have distinct memories of being at my Dad’s parents beach house – Mommom and JJ and watching my grandmother make cream chipped beef. That was my Irish side of the family….

In this house most Friday nights are “pizza night”, a night where I make another go at making gluten free pizza from scratch. Yeah I live a wild and crazy life…. I know….. I know

So here we are again on my quest for pizza that doesn’t taste so….gluten free. There are a fair amount of pizza dough mixes on the market it appears <I just did a quick Google search> most of them pricey. Soon however, I am going to have to resort to ordering a new brand off the internet as I think I have tried Bob’s Red Pizza Crust Mixevery which way you can. Many different types of pizzas and calzones have been attempted with varying degrees of …well success is not the correct word here, let’s go with results.…

Only 2 posts and already a theme. Looking over my photos from the past 2 months to prepare for this I noticed my recipes / experiments lean quite heavy towards one food group.

Pizza.

Yes Pizza is a food group, well in my world it is. Going Gluten-Free is sometimes a pain in the ass sure, but I am fine living without most baked goods, breads, pastas etc. Sure every now and then I get jealous of people biting into a light and fluffy piece of cake, or a real honest to goodness Italian Hoagie (Sub to most of the US unless you are from Philadelphia or New Jersey)
but I have a way to deal with it. If it’s absolutely incredible and sure to be worth it, I cheat and take a bite or two. I am a VERY lucky Gluten-Free person, …